Posted
by
michaelon Saturday March 06, 2004 @12:05AM
from the post-apocalyptic dept.

abysmilliard writes "A young Ukrainian woman has posted a photo journal of her motorcycle rides through Chernobyl and the area surrounding it. Included are pictures of the now-emptied city, maps of current radiation levels, and a discussion of how the area has changed. While the english is quite broken, it's often rather surreal, as well, with quotes like, 'I don't know how sound the silence to those tourists that they can not stand it, but to me after hitting a red line on my bike tacho it sound like all those ghosts cursing 1100cc kawasaki engin.'"

The situation at TMI was pretty serious. Although
no one died, the fuel rods in the core of the
reactor did melt. That's how hot it was. There was a lot of contamination inside of the containment building (it served its designed purpose) and it
took a long time to clean it up.

The differences between TMI and Chernobyl are essentially those of design and the ways in which they affected the disaster.

Though the containment building was very helpful the design of the reactor was somewhat more important, Soviet and US nuclear plants use a different substance as a moderator(could have the term wrong, been a while, it's the thing which slows the neutrons so the reaction can take place). In the US reactors use deuterium(heavy water) as a moderator, if the reaction gets out of control and the heat reaches a certain point the heavywater is vaporized and the reaction stops, in the USSR however they used graphite for this purpose, which does not evaporate in the same way. Because of this, not only was the reaction not contained as well at Chernobyl, but the reaction continued for a much longer period of time releasing more radiation.

Of course the way things were handled also didn't help Chernobyl much, I've seen the footage of the people they sent in there afterwards, they had nowhere near sufficient protection and I've also seen footage of the gigantic lump of plutonium sitting underneath where the reactor used to be. Not a good place for inadequately protected people.

What really blew up Chernobyl was the dangerous experiment that they were carrying out at the time. Even though the design was unstable in principle it was very difficult to get it into that state. They actually had to de-acivate dozens of safeguards before they could run the reactor at very low power, and that was the point where it was unstable.

The Operators and Techs at Chernobyl were doing low power Physics testing and trying to take the reactor critical at the time of the accident. The reactor design was stable and proven. The reactor had been just previously shutdown and had been operating at power. While operating at power one of the fission products that is produced is Xenon, an isotope that has a huge microscopic cross-section for absorption for neutrons, and hence a reactor poison. Unknown to the Operators and Techs this Xenon buildup prevented the reactor from going critical to do the low power testing and they kept bypassing safety circuits to achieve criticality. They also kept pulling "rods" to expose more of the core until nearly the entire core was exposed. They achieved criticality and in a short time the worst thing imaginable happened. Xenon burn-off came down the curve and was no longer an inhibitor to neutron population. The resulting super-critical pulse blew the reactor apart, set fire to the graphite moderator, and in general destroyed the physical plant. The rest is history.

The photojournalist should get some kind of reward for an excellent presentation. This is the best coverage I have seen to date on the results of "Chernobyl".

Funny thing about Three Mile Island - one x-ray in the right place and it wouldn't have happened. A few hundred x-rays in a more convenient spot with a dishonest person changing the numbers over, and no-one apart from the dishonest contrator ever looking at those x-rays and it did happen.

Nuclear safety always should be more than just a guy with a rubber stamp - hopefully three mile island and the subsequent court case changed all of that.

Those who think nuclear accidents can never happen in the good old USA should consider superior or more expensive technology is worthless if the lowest bidding contactors don't even do the job, and no-one is there to see that they haven't done the job.

TMI was nothing like Chernobyl.

Different situation, different outcome, but we can learn from both, so long as we stick to the technical instead of the emotional, and keep nationalism out of it. The lesson I get from Three Mile Island is to watch your contractors - they may not care if what they do can result in a major catastrophe. The lesson I get from Chernobyl is that a steam explosion is far more catastropic when nuclear material can get scattered around - so the design has to avoid that and try to bring it down to a less major incident.

The main problem with nuclear power today is we keep having to subsidise the plants we have - shutting them down is usually a bigger problem than keeping them going. We just have to pour cash in to keep this 1950's white elephant going - at least in the UK where they are not supported by the same weird financial misdirection that makes the US plants appear to make a profit. Maybe when defence in the USA gets pissed off and wants a bit more of their own budget it will also become clear to people in the USA nuclear plants are made up of a lot of expensive parts and require expensive maintainance - it's not a cheap way to boil water.

Well, I was going to point out that the article did show up on Friday night but then I remembered that this was slashdot. Actually, the response time wasn't bad but I'm on an ISDN line so my pipe is pretty thin. Maybe the stereotypes are wrong and people who hang out on slashdot really do have a life. Nah.

(Who me? I'm married and work for a living so, by Friday night, I'm too tired to do much of anything but either watch the tube or read slashdot).

Here is zipped copy of the entire thing [sahrs.net], including a fix of page 16 (+ links) mentioned by another/.'er below. I wanted a personal copy, figured I would offer it to anyone else who wanted to keep this excellent site...

For the record, a free Angelfire site presently gets 1 GB of monthly bandwidth on which to serve up to 20 MB of content. Which means, when/. finishes off this site's bandwidth allowance, this site's gone for the month.

If somebody were to give this unfortunate person Angelfire's highest "element plan" [lycos.com], it would cost $15 for the setup and $14.95 for the first month, and give her 30 GB of monthly traffic. That might be enough to survive a slashdotting.

Insightful, but wrong...as with most nuclear anything-related posts on/.

The RBMK reactors have a positive void coefficient. The rod control mechanisms had been manually disabled for the turbine coast-down experiment (because they kept ramming in the rods, something which should have served as a Big Clue to the operators that what they were doing was a bad idea). When the cooling water began to boil, the reactivity jumped due to that positive void coefficient and the power level spiked 3-4 orders of magnitude in some milliseconds. That flashed the cooling water into steam, which exploded and blew the top off the roof. The 3,000+ degree graphite moderator was now exposed to open air and burst into flame and it was good night, Gracie.

The essay was absolutely amazing. The surreal description is perfect, reminding me of apocalyptic movies of the 80's and describing what I imagined the world looking like in the RPG Gamma World. Abandoned buildings as people left them, houses falling apart, yet seeing scenes of prezwalski looking horses crossing a stream.

After reading you comment and thinking about it, it reminds me of that little short story. I can't remember quite what book it's in (it's in a book of fiction).

It's about a little automated house with no one living there. It told about how it would make breakfast, and clean it up with little mechanical sweeper mice, and the house eventually burns down. The house is in a town that is empty because of a nuclear blast and the only "people" left there is a "shadow" of someone left on a wall from the nuclear blast. Interesting and sad story. The place was just as if everyone had suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth. Everything else was left.

I want to say it was in "A Brave New World" but it could have been a H2G2 book.

That's the weird thing about the place. It's considered basically uninhabitable by humans. Yet nature as a whole seems entirely unfazed by the radition and is thriving in the absence of humans.

On the other hand, it really isn't that weird. The "nature preserve" aspect is only disturbing in relation to the empty roads and buildings. Without those features to provide the desolation aspect, nothing would seem amiss. Plus, nobody is keeping track of the average lifespan of those horses, which is almost certainly below average.

Still, a fascinating photo-essay either way. And I think it's funny that her Kawasaki probably would have been worth as much as a whole town in that part of the world in 1985.

That's the weird thing about the place. It's considered basically uninhabitable by humans. Yet nature as a whole seems entirely unfazed by the radition and is thriving in the absence of humans.

Yeah, but nature doesn't get all sentimental or up-in-arms if critters are born with birth defects or die early from cancer. As long as the critters live long enough to reproduce at a growing rate, then that's all that's needed.

here ya go. [magma.ca] Some info on the death toll. after reading that page I suggest your click around that site a little, it's a good read.
Here is the authors bio [magma.ca] for reference. He does know (unlike most/.ers) what is BS and what is not.

It is very well documented the relationship between high radiation and cancer. The best known study is from Hiroshima [hiroshima.jp], where there was found clear correlations between the rate of cancer and the amount of radiation that people were exposed to. As the study shows, the peak of leukimia was 7-8 years after the atom bomb was dropped.

The link between radiation and cancer has much to do with the increased mutation rate of DNA caused by radiation, which is natural since most cancers are caused by changes in the DNA of a cell. I find it difficult to see why you try to deny this?

It is too bad, but I guess because of the Soviet Union and the turmul in the years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, there has not been done real studies on the wildlife of Chernobyl. (There has been done many studies on the radiaton effects on humans in Chernobyl [ratical.org].) But since all life is related to DNA, there is no doubt that the animals and plants in the area has been seriously affected. Can you show any scientific study that has shown no impact on nuclear radiation on wildlife, we would like to hear about it. And remember, radiation is one thing, but plutonium is one of the mosth leathal chemical poisons in its own right, so if the radiations doesn't get you, the radioactiv chemicals is there for you to worry about the. Again, it is quite natural that plutonium and other radioactive isotops made in a nuclear plant are poisonous, since because they don't excist naturally in nature, organisms have not evolved protections against them.

The best guide to the studies on animals and humans, as of a couple of years ago, was a survey article in Science Magazine, one of the leading professional science publications in the world. Rather than relying on the sorts of news reports you reference (which are not scientific and report information from governments which have a major financial stake in blaming all problems on Chernobyl), I'll take Science Magazine any time

Your evolution based argument is pure supposition, and is unlikely given that there are natural compounds with similar chemical toxicity (other heavy metals) and plenty of natural alpha-emitting natural compounds (e.g. polonium).

As far as the chemical toxicity, this [isu.edu] says::The chemical toxicity of plutonium (a heavy metal) is inconsequential alongside the radiation effects.

In other words, the chemical toxicity is irrelevant.

Overall, ricin, of Al Qaeda fame, is 10-20 times more toxic than plutonium. Botulinum toxins (the reference bacteria strain for which was found in a refrigerator in Iraq by David Kay's team) is 10,000 times more toxic than plutonium.

Furthermore, I do not deny that high levels of radiation cause cancer, not to mention radiation sickness. What is not well known is that people live and prosper in areas of very high natural radiation.

When one looks at low levels of radiation, the sensitivity is undetectable. Low dose radiation level rules are based on an unproven and somewhat implausible theory called Linear, No-threshold Theory (LNT). This theory is used to derive radiation hazard predictions and exposure standards as one of the first uses of the Precautionary Principle. The theory assumes that one can estimate risk at a low level by applying the ratio of that level to a high level where the risk as been established. The risks for low level radiation dosages are hypothetical, having been derived by this ratioing from populations exposed to much higher dosages (uranium miners, Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors).

Furthermore, the risk is presumed to be based on total lifetime dosage independent of the rate of exposure. Again, this has not been established scientifically.

You mention Hiroshima. Because Hiroshima had no local fallout, all excess radiation exposure occurred in an extremely short period of time - most of it in a few seconds. Furthermore, the levels of dosage received by Hiroshima victims had to be estimated, which could not be done accurately.

There are several problems with LNT. First, it is based on a very old, discredited model of carcinogenesis which assumes that a single point mutation in DNA is the cause of cancer. In fact, the process is far more complex, with cells having the ability to repair mutations.

This means that the odds of acquiring non-repairable damage are higher if the radiation is delivered more quickly, because a single cell may sustain multiple hits. There may also be secondary effects, due to the death of an excessive number of cells at the same time.

great radiobiologist, the late Harald Rossi summarized the situation as follows: "It would appear...that radiation carcinogenesis is an intricate intercellular process and that the notion that it is caused by simple mutations in a unicellular response is erroneous. Thus, there is no scientific basis for the "linearity hypothesis" according to which cancer risk is proportional to absorbed dose and independent of dose rate at low doses" .

However, lets just assume that LNT is correct, since it is widely used.

Consider this (April 2000):

The Chernobyl catastrophe resulted in vast quantities of radionuclides being released into the global atmosphere, which were easy to measure even high in the stratosphere, and far away at the South Pole . It was a godsend for anti-nuclear activists. Yet according to estimates of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR),

Inside the Chernobyl Plant, you'd need a lead block encased around you to be safe. The radiaction in the vicinity of the pile is still so intense that most electronics malfunction within minutes, if not less.

... but not all that is invisible and harms is radioactive. Heavy metals such as mercury, PCBs etc, can be seriously nasty. The sheer calous lack of regulation of these pollutants by governments world-wide is unbelievable. Even your fabric-softener can have mercury put in it.

So while there is this collective phobia and aura surrounding radiation, there isn't around other many other toxic threats. Note the security surrounding nuclear materials, but how easy it was to obtain unbelievably toxic dimethylmercury (until someone killed herself when a droplette momentarily touched her protective glove) until recently.

The sheer calous lack of regulation of these pollutants by governments world-wide is unbelievable. Even your fabric-softener can have mercury put in it.

Wow, welcome to the 1940's. Where have you been in this last half century? I'd say the furious over-regulation by governments world-wide is unbelievable. For instance, I now have to recycle the few micro-grams of mercury contained in fluorescent lamps and batteries. Do you know what's the biggest cause of cancer in humans due to chemicals? Salt. Sodium chloride, that is. Do you know what's the biggest cause of cancer due to radiation? Sunshine. Do you know what's the second biggest cause of cancer after tobacco? Obesity. Don't believe my words, ask any oncologist. No, the biggest environmental threat to humans isn't either radiation or chemicals, it's ignorance, stupidity, and paranoia.

Even if your claims were true, one has to consider that the regulation may be working. The reason we don't see thousands of people dying from mercury poisoning is because they don't have the opportunity.

No shit. I just recently was informed of a student around this area who, for whatever reason apparently "ate a lot of tuna" with her dog one week, and get this, they are BOTH suffering from mercury POISONING. Now I don't know what the fuck "a lot of tuna" is, maybe they got a whole tuna as a gift or something, but that you can possibly get mercury poisoning from just an amount that you can stuff in your face in a week (and let's assume that's not 24/7 eating tuna, in that case you'd die of your stomach rupturing first), is seriously screwed up.

Now let's say she ate tuna EVERY meal for a whole week...that adds up to what, 21 meals of tuna? How many tuna sandwiches have you had recently? In 21 weeks will you have consumed enough to otherwise qualify you as "mercury poisoned"?

I'm glad the general public has such a say in how our food is raised because, yes sir, I loves me that good old American heavy metal poisonin'! I'll fry it up in my recycled radioactive-waste frying pan!

I felt the same way. and at the same time it reminded me of the ghost towns in the sierras that I have visited. there too you feel unnerved by the silence and the items just left sitting there unmoved for decades, and the odd decay that they undergo.

There's another site out there with pictures of the abandoned buildings. Something about it is incredibly compelling and sad; almost like looking at a modern-day Pompeii. People who were children back when this happened go back there and spray-paint messages to former classmates on the walls of their elementary schools, trying to contact them or just to say they're still still around.

I also saw on a:60 Minutes segment a few years ago that the gov't pipes music into various parts of the city, where apparently there are still some people working--this is to keep them from going insane from the silence.

If you want to watch a good movie on the threat of vast radiation poisoning, watch the BBC movie Threads. I got this tip from another Slashdot post a while ago, and am passing it no. I had to go to my library to find it.

It is about how the "threads" of society essentially unravel within a generation after a nuclear attack, in the face of massive homelessness, starvation and of course widespread and incurable radiation sickness.

She shows a nice map of the radiation levels, but without showing the scale it doesn't mean jack. She has the norm listed as 12-18.
I am guessing that she means millirem per hour, but I honestly have no idea. Anyone know?

This comment in the essay: This is highest building in town and in April 26-27, 1986 after reactor exploaded, people gathered on the roof of this building to watch a beautiful shining that rised above APP. They didn't know this was shining of radiation. they learned it on next day when evacuation began reminded me of talks I had with some of my patients some years ago that either lived in southern Utah and Nevada, or were in the military. Whole families would gather on high mountains to watch the pretty lights from the atomic bombs being tested in the open air and I had one old army guy tell me that soldiers who were gathered at the exercises, if they were not issued goggles, were told to look away and cover your eyes with your hands. When the bomb went off, you could actually see the bones in your hands from all the X-rays that were emitted from the bomb.

When the bomb went off, you could actually see the bones in your hands from all the X-rays that were emitted from the bomb.

How exactly does this work? When have human eyes been capable of seeing the x-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? Or, is there some grain of truth in this, in terms of the visible light being so intense that it's possible to see vague impression of bones within your hand? I suspect the latter.

I am not exactly sure, but there must have been some combination of bright light and higher energy radiation. From a retinal vision perspective, all one would need to do would be to activate opsins and this could easily be imagined happening with all of the high energy particles being emitted by the bomb.

Also, a quick google search reveals that others [aracnet.com] have relayed the same experience.

When the bomb went off, you could actually see the bones in your hands from all the X-rays that were emitted from the bomb. True, but not for the Reason you stated. I dont care how bright the light is, you cant see X-Rays with your eyes. however, with a sufficiently bright light your hand becomes translucent and you can see the outline of your bones. Try this: With a very powerful flashlight (like a Maglite) go into a dark room and let your eyes adjust for a minute or two. Then hold your hand so the palm completely covers the flashlight part, dont let any light escape. Turn the flashlight on and you should be able to make out the outline of your bones, if the light is powerful enough. But you still cant see X-rays.

"This is highest building in town and in April 26-27, 1986 after reactor exploaded, people gathered on the roof of this building to watch a beautiful shining that rised above APP. They didn't know this was shining of radiation."

This makes me wonder exactly what those people saw. It obviously wouldn't be a bright flash like a nuclear bomb since it wasn't a nuclear explosion, it was a steam explosion with a tremendous amount of aerosolized radioisotope contamination. So it's a good bet that if this story is true they were actually looking at a blue glowing steam/dust cloud with the glow caused by CERENKOV RADIATION [umr.edu] in the air!! To actually see Cerenkov radiation in the air would mean that the radiation in that initial rising cloud must have been unbelieveably intense, and they didn't even know the danger of the situation......horrifying.

Cherenkov radiation is not observed in air (you need particles with mass traveling with speed higher than the speed of light in given medium , and the optical density of air is low (close to vacuum), the particles would have to travel at speeds near to c - which are difficult to obtain because of relativistic effects. (You can get that from accelerators, but not from fission)You can see Cherenkov typicaly in water - the blue shine around immersed fuel rods or intense radioisotope source.

There is similar-looking bluish shine/flash around extremely strong sources, like criticality accident with Pu, U, or in nuclear explosion (the mushroom has bluish envelope). This shine is caused by intense ionisation of air molecules by radiation, mostly X-ray. The recombination of ions produces excited states whis give away the surpluss of energy by emission in UV/vis , which also appears bluis white.

The site is quite facinating. In a way Chernobyl is the largest time capsule in the world. Amazing to see that you could just go into homes and offices and see EXACTLY what life was like there in 1986. If it wasn't for the plants and animals and such, things would be almost completely identicle. It would be very cool if some archiologists could get some NASA space suits or something like that (to protect them from the radiation) to go in and photograph all those places and things.

The MOST interesting thing in the article to me though was the "deafening silence" that is mentioned. The author said that many companies have investigaed doing things like 2 hour tours but the tourists complain and want to go home after 15 minutes because it's so quite it's like being deaf. I wouldn't think that it would be so bad (go to wheat feild in the middle of the US and it's silent too), but I guess it's the combination of all the buildings and normal city sights (with the exception of the fact that there are no people) and the silence that makes it so eerie and spooky.

Not only is it a time capsule, it is a great chance to watch how nature reclaims the land and how the wildlife adapts - obviously all of the animals haven't died. I wonder if there are any scientists watching for radiation caused progressive mutations?

I've been in a few places in Algonquin park [algonquinpark.on.ca] that 75 years ago were there used to be towns, hotels and whatnot. If you aren't keeping your eyes open and looking for it, you will miss the signs.

Now obviously, this isn't going to be the case here, but it will still be interesting to see what can be learned - for example, how are the roads holding up? With almost no wear and tear, the area could serve as an excellent testbed for environmental effects on road surfaces (hot and cold damage, etc).

There was a joke told in Hungary (and presumably other Soviet bloc countries) after they'd been listening to Voice of America report on the disaster for days, but getting no local mention of it at all until about a week after the event.

Q: Why do we celebrate the October Revolution on November 7?A: Because that is when TASS (Soviet news agency) saw fit to report it.

"marauders in radiation poluted area are not just a regular marauders, they don't steal stuff for themselves. There were cases of radiactive tv sets and other stuff being sold on city second hand markets and then police shot 7 or 8 of them and it helped"

Now, does that sound like the Soviet Russia from a bad movie, or what?

She mentions that the radiation exposure in Kiev during the first few days was equivalent to about a year's worth of radiation at Chernobyl now. The bastards did not inform the populace until the wind blew into Europe and radiation alarms started going off, igniting international alarm. My wife, a child at the time, was belatedly rushed out of town along with all the children in Kiev a week later. I can't prove a link, but the fact is my wife had cancer surgery just last week. I'm sure that coal and gas are worse for the environment, and I support nuclear energy as a cleaner alternative, but a freak accident combined with a stupid reaction of a government made matters much worse than they should have been. People will be suffering due to Chernobyl for decades and centuries to come.

You have to get the ladder from the janitor's closet. Break the lock with the crowbar you found in the parking garage (assuming you came in that way and made it past the zombie guarding the ticket booth.)

I've been to Ukraine 3 times in the past 2 years: my gf is of Ukrainian extraction. Chernobyl is a name to conjure demons with there. Even more so than in the West. What's even scarier is that the Ukrainian government's denial over the state that it is in. They still are running at least a couple of the reactors and they are not being terribly maintained. The Russians came out stating that the buildings that the reactors are in are about to collapse...yet the Ukrainian government is unwilling to shut the place down.

Expect a sequel there, folks, and it's gonna be just as ugly if not worse. To make matters even more horrifying, based on the behavior of the Ukrainian government, the people are going to be informed through western sources long before, but far too late even so, that anything wrong is happening there when it does.

Chernobyl Reactor 2 was shut down in 1991 after a fire, Reactor 1 was shut down in '96 to scam money out of the EU, and reactor 3 (the last one standing) was shut down permanantly in December of 2000.

However, the cement structure encasing reactor 4 (the one that went boom) is starting to show signs of wear and about 10% of it is cracked.

Scientific types are warning about structural failure happening sooner rather than later. The real issue here is repairing that, because when it comes tumbling down we're going to be in a world of trouble again... and what with the no-soviet union anymore, good luck convincing anyone to go to ground 0 and clean it up (rather than forcing them to do it at gunpoint.)

I realize this might be slightly off-topic, since I don't think this article really discusses the any of the dangers/merits (or lack thereof) of nuclear power in the first place. However, I know that all the same, some people are going to try to bring it up, so before anyone starts trolling about how dangerous nuclear power is, I just thought I'd point out:

1) Chernobyl was based on very old technology. Nuclear power is much safer today.

2) France gets >80% of its power from nuclear sources. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest sources of energy in the world. (I have nothing against fossil fuels, either--at the moment NOTHING has proven as economical. But I do think ultimately, we will have to find alternatives, and nuclear power is certainly a viable option.)

3) It is my opinion that the worst part of Chernobyl was the way the communist regime tried to keep it a secret, until they found out that it was just so big they simply couldn't keep it a secret anymore. Sure, many other governments in the world (and I am NOT naming any ones in particular) have also been forced to fess up to things later, but that is NOT an excuse. The Russian government was truly evil, and I will not retract that statement, as long as I live.

Assuming the plant is well run, never attacked by terrorists, and the nuclear waste it generates never leaks into the environment. And if any of those things DO happen... well, 48,000 years is a rather long time to wait before you can move back home...

Many people think the Chernobyl area is just like a desert. It's true, there are no people, but there ARE animals. Researches have found rats living there. When they tested those rats, which are living healthily, the scientists found that DNA of rats changed as fast as it had in last 20 million years. That's right, the radiation caused mutations (or evolution) in 20 years, at rate equal to 20 million years.
The rats aren't mutilated or anything, they just happen to adapt.

There's a bacteria that can live in high radiation places due to high redundancy of DNA. Those suckers have 5 copies of dna on 1 long strand, and can auto-correct incorrect bits. And multiple strands per cell.

That this was the most eye opening thing I have seen linked on/. in a long time. Really makes all the SCO and Ipod stuff seem kinda small. I mean that was one of the most surreal things I have experienced in a long time.

There is something sad and beautiful about being to look into a land that has been poisoned and shut down from the other side of the world.

It is eerie that a beautiful young woman would be our guide. Eerie that she would chronicle this deadened scene for us to view while enjoying the freedom it gives her, well aware of the danger and of those who died and still suffer the effects of the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever known.

As I slouch back in my chair, well aware of the life around me in this chilly San Francisco evening, it becomes clear that sometimes the internet offers us too much.

Not to nitpick, and I completely agree with how powerful the imagery is (and the sentiment you express), but the Japanese might disagree about Chernobyl being "the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever known."Disasters can happen on purpose, too.

Starting with paragraph 1.26 we find a discussion. In paragraph 1.28 we find that there were some 2000 cases of thyroid cancer attributed to the radiation (iodine). However, thyroid cancer can be treated and there is no real death rate associated with the thyroid cancers.

Next we find that the anticipated development of leukimias has not occured. In paragraph 1.36 we find this quote: unexpected appearance of early childhood thyroid cancer, the unexpected absence of leukaemia stemming from the accident.

In paragraph 1.38 we see that there is a iodine deficiency problem in the population and that addressing this problem in a timely fashion would no doubt have made a considerable difference.

Starting with paragraph 2.01 on page 30, we have a history of the event itself. In paragraph 2.03 I131 is discussed. This isotope has a half life of 8.05 days and were the population given an ample supply of non-radioactive iodine - through the use of simple iodized table salt - then the radioactive version would not have been picked up.

It is really unfortunate that iodine pills could not have been distributed faster!

On page 56 we find more telling information. 28 highly exposed individuals died within 4 months of the accident (see box 4.2). In addition to the end of 1998, 11 others died.

in paragraph 4.18 we have more discussion of the thyroid cancers, and the esitmation is made that the total number could be as high as 8,000.

In the end, while this certainly was a major disaster with an impact on innocent people that should not be underestimated, we are still left with the facts that the media overestimated the impact and the death rate by many orders of magnitude.

In fact some of the pictures clearly demonstrate this. If one looks at the flora and the fauna in the pictures we see groups of wild animals happily running along totally oblivious to the radiation.

These animals have a faster metabolic rate than humans and thus are not as radiation hardy as we are. Yet they are clearly thriving and the world they are living in, and rearing their offspring can only be described as very beautiful.

Yes the radiation is there and yes it should not be scoffed at. But the pictures clearly show that animal life is not impacted all that much. Those horses look pretty healthy and pretty happy to me!

I lived not that far from Cernobyl. I was 8 at the time. When it happened it was so downplayed that nobody outside that small area realized the impact, until much later. It was on the evening news and it was a 5 minute thing, my dad was a little worried but said it's probably something minor. They showed a cloud of smoke comming from the place and that's all, then other daily news followed. I also remember later, my mom saying how that year many of her plants outside had died, don't know if it is related or not. The worst is when the government had asked for volunteers to help clean-up the mess and promised appartments for those who sign up. They didn't say that when they come home to those new appartments, they won't have that time much to enjoy them. There were rumours how people with heavy doses where "cooked" that the skin and meat was comming of their bones and they couldn't even feel that.

Instead of just karma whore with a wget, I made a listing for the Distributed Mirror Project [wolffelaar.nl] of the site. I added the mirrors listed here (that I could connect to), and they are listed on the DMP page for this site [wolffelaar.nl]

This way I'm Karma whoring for doing some real work for this wonderful site she made, and oh yeah./. will get something after it uses her bandwidth up (unless someone had graciously upgraded her account, in which case mod me to oblivion - I've got karma to burn.)

My uncle was a member of one of the first rescue teams that were sent to Chernobyl after the disaster. This might be slightly off topic, but if you think that the pictures of the empty city are disturbing, take a look at people who were there after the tragic event.

I hate a lot of things about my former country, the Soviet Union, and its leaders. One of the things that I hated the most was the fact that people were never told the truth. In May of 1986 my uncle was told that he had to go to Chernobyl to help patch things up. Since he was a memeber of an elite task team that was a part of chemical forces, a special unit within the Soviet Army, he had no other options. He went there in May and he spent some quality time there. His major task was to drive tons of cement to a helicopter that would drop it off on the damaged reactor.

The not-so-funny thing was that nobody who was in my uncle's shoes knew what was going on there. The superior officers, had to tweak radiation meters down so nobody could find out the real level of radiation. People did not have proper protection, tools to work with; moreover, the Soviet leaders did try to play things down a notch. Afterall, how could a superpower have a major disaster?

Out of all of my uncle's rescue team, only a dozen or so people are alive now. All of them are disabled. My uncle has problems with his eyes and due to this fact he had to quit his job: he was a professional photographer. The Ukranian government pays him a small pension, not enough to buy food for a week. His immune system got reduced down to 60% of what he used to have. Still, he's better than his son. My cousin's system is 40% of the normal level. I remember reading a newspaper about a woman who had to buy a bottle of vodka every day. She did it because her husband could not surive through pain without it. Just as my uncle, he was in Chernobyl trying to fix the Soviet problem without exposing it to the rest of the world. That guy was lucky. His kids had been born before he went to Chernobyl. You won't believe how many stories I've heard when people just wanted to die without pain and suffering.

Finally, here is a surprise for you. Chernobyl is not the only empty city. In fact, if you want to see more of them, you should travel to southern Belarus. See, due to the winds and the rain that happened right after the disaster, most of the radiation that escaped in Chernobyl ended up miles away in the neighboring state. In fact, Belarus recieved more damage than the Ukraine due to the wind pattern for that day. Most of the winds blew from the Ukraine straight into my motherland and the damage was done. I was lucky. Although I was in the rain that day, most of the radiation passed around my town. However, many towns received a solid amount of radiated water but the government did not do anything until it was late. As I said above, the government did everything it could to cover up the problem.

We were told to burn our clothing and take a shower. That is it. That was the f*cking Soviet solution to the problem. Months later dozens of small towns were evacuated. People left leaving everything behind in hopes that they would return. Return my ass. The only people who returned were either looters or bums who scored nice houses where they could live. Years later, after the Soviet regime had collapsed, some reporters were providing us with information places that were emptied out. Most of these places are still there. They are a real time machine. If you go there, you'll see pretty much everything as it was in late 80's. Pictures of those places are distrubing, but not as bad as pictures of kids with cancer or disabilities due to the Chernobyl disaster. As for me, I am afraid of having a child myself. Who knows what got inside of me during that f*cking rain... All I know is that some of my friends started to develop problems already.

Because, one day, we are going to run out of fossil fuels, and one day, our energy needs will be greater than that possible by covering the available areas of the Earth with solar energy collectors.

Nuclear power is dirty, but... unless we use and research it NOW, it'll always stay dirty. Coal plants, while still emitting pollution, are MUCH more efficient and much LESS polluting than they were 50 years ago.

"The whole "what do we do with nuclear waste" thing is way overblown."

No, it's not overblown at all. I can deal with a lot of things but this is one that I don't want in MY backyard!

It doesn't take much of this radioactive shit to cause a serious disaster. I agree with using something like Yuca Mt. to store it all in but even this has problems.

1) Transportation. Getting it there will be more than half the fun. What if there's an accident on the way in? Which town along the way will become the next Chernobyl?

2) Possible environmental consequences. Things like water table contamination are a real concern.

3) Natural disasters. A sudden earthquake or volcanic activity could certainly ruin your day.Can you predict the future for 10,000+ years? That's how long a site would need to remain stable.

Of course, where it's all stored now is a bigger nightmare because it can hardly be protected - particularly from terrorists. Then there's the waste of the plants themselves. I haven't heard any real info on what to do with a decomissioned plant yet other than just 'leave it lay'. Not good at all.

I'm not nuke-phobic, but I am realistic about man - an imperfect being handling something that you simply CANNOT make a mistake about.

The sad thing is, this is hardly the first time this sort of thing has happened. I don't usually support Greenpeace, but check this info out about the city of Mayak since a nuclear disaster. These people still LIVE THERE! Some of the pictures in their image gallery are quite disturbing:

Seems you were programmed well during the duck and cover days. I own a Russian motorcycle here in the US (named same as the river on the rad map) and find it very tough and reliable.
Don't believe all that you were fed, go there and hang out (not necessarily this place) and you will find some of our propaganda was true but a lot was/is not.

"First of all, this should very much be an example of the terrors, not of nuclear power per se, but of nuclear war. With a war-happy president, this is all the more scary."

If you're interested in that sort of thing, you shouldn't be looking at Chernobyl as an example, you should be fact-finding Nagasaki and Hiroshima. _Those_ are examples of nuclear devastation during wartime; Chernobyl was the result of an nuclear accident involving a power plant reactor meltdown. Quite a different situation.

Sorry to say this, but the fact that on such a story -- which is highly interesting and moving at the same time --, the first five comments are (+5, Funny) ones, makes me feel rather sad.

Anyway, these are great pictures. Most people have forgotten about Tchernobyl now -- I bet practically everyone thinks that life is just going on there normally by now. The pictures show us the dangers of working with nuclear energy -- one small mistake, and the whole region is doomed for a long time, far beyond the lifetime of a single human. If this doesn't teach us a lesson about safety and security, I don't know what will.

Yeah.. Lesson One is don't use an RBMK reactor with no secondary containment. Current (and future) designs have Fail-Safe systems where, should the control system fail, the whole shebang fails into a "safe" mode (control rods are dropped which effectively stops the reaction and free-flowing coolant is delivered to alleviate residual core heat). TMI would have failed safe, except for incorrect operator intervention.

Chernobyl was also utilized to produce weapons-grade plutonium as well as civilian electricity, which is why the graphite moderator was used (instead of water, as in US civilian designs). When the graphite burned, the temperature shot up very quickly and the reactor exploded through the pressure-seal which was the only line of defense (not the reinforced concrete secondary containment vessel in Western designs). TMI showed how well that design could withstand both an incident and poor handling of that incident.

From what I read about the Chernobyl disaster it wasn't really the reactor design that was at fault but the dangerous experiments that were being carried out at the time.

"The disaster began with a routine operation for maintenance and fuel change that commenced a day before the accident. In addition to these procedures, the technical crew wanted to perform a test of the plant's steam turbines. Their goal was to determine if the turbines would continue to provide power for the plant's safety systems after their steam supply was cut off. While attempting to perform this test, they committed a series of errors that culminated in catastrophe. More than simple blunders, the errors stemmed from a reckless disregard for safety procedures. The errors compounded, and the disaster would likely not have occurred if any one error had been avoided.

The crew began by reducing the reactor's power so they could start their experiment. They also switched off the reactor's emergency core cooling system. This meant that in the event of a malfunction the reactor would become dangerously hot, which is exactly what subsequently happened. At 12:28 A.M. the crew made another serious error by putting the reactor's regulator at much too low a setting for the planned experiment. At this point, the reactor should have been shut down and the experiment abandoned, but the crew feared a reprimand for the incorrect regulator setting, so they decided to bring the reactor back up to power. To do this, they removed most of the graphite rods that moderated the fissioning of nuclear materials in the reactor core. By 1:00 A.M., the power output had reached 200 MW, still too low for the experiment. At this point, they switched on two extra pumps for the circulation of more cooling water in the core. This action made the reactor highly unstable, and water and steam levels began to oscillate uncontrollably. The crew then made another major mistake by blocking the automatic shut-down system. At 1:23, they started their experiment, and a few seconds later they switched off the safety apparatus that would have come into operation as soon as the turbines stopped.

In less than a minute, the crew chief realized that he had a serious problem, and he ordered the graphite rods to be reinserted in the core. The rods did not fall home, probably because the rods or the nuclear fuel had been distorted by the heat. The rods were then disconnected so that they could fall into the core, but by this time the situation was hopeless. The reactor's power surged from 7 percent to several hundred times its normal level. An explosion rocked the core, followed by another one 4 seconds later. These explosions blew the roof off of the reactor and caused the collapse of a refueling crane into the core, destroying what was left of the cooling system. A reaction of the steam with the fuel rods' zirconium cladding caused the formation of hydrogen, which then ignited, setting off 30 separate fires through the plant. The graphite in the core also ignited."http://www.fofweb.com/Subscription/Scie nce/Helicon.asp?SID=2&iPin=ffests0172

Actually, it *was* partly the reactor design that was to blame, as well as operator error.

The Chernobyl design had control rods entering the core from top and bottom. This particular design causes the reactor to have, in certain operating regions, a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity (like positive feedback for you non-nukes.) This has the effect of the reactor power level rising in response to a rise in temperature - and in response to the bottom control rods rising into the core.

Western designs are almost all designed to have a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity in operating regions.

What happened was, as the reactor temperature rose, power followed, such that when they finally tried to shutdown the reactor, reactor power level shot way up (basically, the reactor went prompt critical - some experts have said that the reactor went prompt supercritical - I'm not sure myself since I'd have to go back and research the values for beta and beta-bar that Chernobyl was designed to.) As a result, the power level exceeded design values by a couple hundred times, and the resulting step rise in temperature and pressure caused a massive steam void to form in the reactor, which promptly escaped by rupturing the top of the reactor.

Had Chernobyl been built to western designs the disaster wouldn't have happened.

1. Cooling and fuel channels containing thousands of welded joints through which the coolant continually passes vs. a western design consisting of a single pressure vessel that holds the majority of the coolant covering the core with a few loops to circulate water to the steam generators. This makes the design much more prone to a leak in an inaccessible location.

2. Using graphite instead of water. Graphite has its uses - a power reactor is not one of them.

3. A positive temperature coefficient of reactivity. If you do *nothing* else, make sure your design has a negative coefficient in all operating regions.

4. A flimsy steel shed vs. a proper containment. Even when the reactor suffered a steam explosion, a proper containment structure would have caused Chernobyl to be a localized accident resulting in the contamination of the inside of the containment structure, instead of a disaster affecting the entire world.

Yeah, me too. Stupid piss-taking jokes about an event that goes beyond the realm of experience of any one of the lives of a small group of people currently sitting on their ass in a comfy place, reading a website called/. in sanctity and relative haven.

Prosperity does not give one the right to degrade another persons experience... Chernobyl is no laughing matter, even still to this day, for a lot of people.

And before anyone pulls out the ol' "get over it, its only a joke" excuse, let me just say that jokes have their time and place.

The Chernobyl incident was a completely different time, in a completely different place. If this site was hosted in Russia, and the jokes were about American disasters, how many of you would consider them to be flame-bait, or make a noise about how 'inappropriate' it is?

Ridicule aint no compliment, and it aint no reflection.

That said, I hope that the generations yet to come understand that the generation currently alive are sorry for what they did to the future, with Chernobyl.